


Trauma

by Irondragonfly1002



Category: Anyone who wants to read
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:53:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26133766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irondragonfly1002/pseuds/Irondragonfly1002





	1. Giving In

"No more overtime Grace." Gaia said with a finality in her voice. She had been working a lot of OT and her body was tired, so tired in fact that she was seriously thinking of taking a couple of days off so that she could get some rest and reset her body. She certainly needed it but she doubted, given her work ethic, that it would happen; she would hear someone's sob story about why they needed her to do overtime or cover for them and there she would be, spending her evening at the hospital when she really should be home doing some sort of self-care, something she rarely ever did. In a fit of self pity, she shoved her labcoat into her locker, not caring if she was wrinkling it or catching it in the door. She was exasperated and she knew it was showing but to be perfectly honest, she didn't care at the moment, she knew this was going to go the way all her other interactions went, just when she was going to try and spend the night forgetting Ryan and all his evil shenanigans since the day she had thrown him out after finding him in their bed with another woman. At first he had acted contrite and claimed it would never happen again, that it was just this one time, all the excuses that people use when they are caught doing something that they aren't supposed to be doing. She had flatly refused to take him back, believing infidelity to be an absolute relationship crusher. For her, it meant that he didn't honestly care for or respect her and felt that she would be ok with him going elsewhere....guess what, she wasn't! She had thrown him out that night, demanding he gather his things and take his floosie with him, she could take care of him, pay for everything and make sure his clothes were ready for his "job interviews" which she strongly suspected never happened. When he realized she meant business and wasn't going to back down, he had changed tactics. He had threatened to come back and hurt her and when that didn't get a rise out of her, he threatened to come back himself or send his "goons", although she hadn't realized he had "goons", and kill her if she didn't forgive him and take him back. Gathering all the courage she could muster, she stood her ground and refused to budge, she wasn't going to take him back and lower her standards, someone out there wanted her for who she was and for what she could bring to a relationship He was out there, he just hadn't crossed her path yet; all she could do was keep trying and putting herself out there. However, if she kept working all these hours of OT, she was never going to find him. Still, she wasn't going to change her stance about taking Ryan back, you don't raise your hand to a woman, especially someone like her and expect to come out of it unscathed, she might look like she couldn't take care of herself but what people don't know is that she practiced Taekwondo regularly and was working to her black belt shortly. She could hit back and defend herself but, and she didn't know why, she was living in fear of him returning and hurting her out of revenge or something equally as bad and twisted. As she turned from her locker to face her coworker, Grace gave her her very best impression of puppy dog eyes. "Please G," she practically whined, "we have a Level 1 coming in and I need my very best trauma surgeon on it, it's a motorcycle accident and from what I hear, the driver is pretty badly torn up. All I have is Dr. Stevenson, and he is fresh out of school,still wet behind the ears and he can't do half of what you can." she said, practically on her begging Gaia. She knew exactly how to work Gaia to get her to stay and used it mercilessly to get her to do OT when she needed to. It also helped that Gaia didn't know how to say the word "no" "I'll stay on one condition, Grace." she said, making a quick decision to do a little bartering before flat out saying yes to her friend and supervisor. "If I stay and work on this Level 1, I get the next 4 days off, no calls, no pages and I don't come in." she said with defiance, waiting for her to challenge her and pull her usual that Gaia was too important and they needed to be able to get in touch with her at a moments notice. The other woman looked at her for a long moment before she responded; Grace looked like she had been working since WW2 and had been in every battle and skirmish and come out on top of every one of them. She looked like she could take a Panzer Tank down with one hand tied behind her back. Surprisingly however, she finally nodded and let out a long suffering sigh. "Alright G, if you stay tonight to help, I will give you the next 4 days off and you can be off the grid; no one will try to contact you until your next shift. 


	2. Excitement!

Smothering a long suffering sigh, Gaia nodded. "Alright Grace, I'll stay tonight and work on the motorcycle guy. However, as soon as I get him stable and in ICU though, I'm off to start my mini vacation." she said. "You know how I work though, I won't leave until he is conscious and stable in the ICU, then I take off and leave him to you all." Glancing at her watch, she pulled her lab coat out of her locker and slid her arms into the sleeves, shrugging it back on. "Awww man, it hasn't even had time to get cold yet." she wrinkled her nose and closed the door, spinning the combination lock. She shook her head and turned around to face her friend, adjusting the lapels of the coat and straightening her ID badge as she spoke. A huge, relieved smile broke out across Grace's face as she heard what Gaia said. In a move that shocked Gaia, Grace hugged her tightly; it was well known that Grace never hugged anyone, she claimed that she had been taught by her mentor that human touch was one of the most contagious things you could experience, that it contained more germs than french kissing a gas station sink. Although, she wasn't sure she believed the old nurse's story, she still cringed every time she thought about that analogy, it never failed to give her a passing wave of nausea. Before they could say anything else to one another, they heard the doors to the ER slam open and shouts erupted from the nurse's station. One voice rose above the others and called her name, signalling the beginning of her trauma care. She and Grace raced out of the locker room and into the ER proper, heading for the trauma room and what awaited her. What she found would have made the new residents faint, but not her; she was a seasoned profession who had been at it for long enough that she was able to shut her emotions off when she had to and look critically at a situation. Sometimes it was hard to do given the situation but she managed it. It was a practice she had honed with years of treating trauma patients, seeing the worst injuries imaginable and having to put them back together without becoming emotionally invested. She ripped off her lab coat and tossed it on the nearest chair, knowing it was going to get bloody but she honestly didn't care at the moment. The man on the gurney was still in his clothes, well for the most part; his jeans and leather riding chaps were being cut off but his vest was still on. She knew better than to try and remove the vest, she had worked on enough bikers to know the basic rules. As she called out for his vitals and took a cursory look over him, cataloging his injuries, she mentally made a list of what was going on and how she would have to fix it. His lower right leg was most definitely broken, the white bone was protruding through the skin with his foot facing a way that it wasn't originally attached. One look and she knew that it was going to take a trip to the OR to put it back together in a way that would allow him to walk again in the future. He was covered in road rash, his skin ripped from his body in many places blood and dirt smeared all over, the nurses already cleaning the wounds and removing the gravel from the road. She was proud of her team, she didn't have to tell them what to do, they had all worked together for so long that they were a well-oiled machine. They knew how she wanted to start a trauma case and usually were well on their way by the time she raced in. "I need Xray here, STAT!" she called. "Chest Xray, Right Tib/FIb and Abdomen! We need to see if he has air in his belly, I don't like how it's swelling!" she shouted. Her eyes slid to the monitors that were attached to him, monitoring his heart rate, respirations, blood pressure and oxygen. There was something that she didn't like about the numbers she was reading, something in her gut told her that they needed to be quick about getting him stable, there was something wrong but she couldn't put her finger on it. Something was going to happen and in her gut she could tell it was going to be bad. She called for medications and had just finished administering them when XRAY rolled in. "Everyone not necessary OUT!" she called as the tech started setting up, used to what needed to happen. In a trauma you couldn't be hesitant, you needed to just jump in and do what you needed to do, you needed to be strong and in charge. She stayed in the room until the tech was ready to shoot and only stepped away from her patient at that point. She was going to take him down to the OR as soon as she could but until then, she wouldn't leave him alone. She needed to keep an eye on his vitals and make sure he was ok. Thoughts and plans of what she was going to do to fix his injuries ran through her head until she wa sripped back to reality by a shrill, shrieking noise. Her head snapped up and her brain came back to the present as all the alarms started going off, her patient was crashing and she needed to get back in there immediately! The tech backed off and pulled their machine out of the room as Gaia climbed up on the gurney and began compressions as another resident began to bag him. "Get the fluids up and running and hang a liter of blood, we need to get his fluid volume up, he's lost too much blood. He's bottoming out, open it all wide!" she shouted orders as she counted compressions in her head between them. "Soon as he is stable, let's get to the OR, I need to get him put back together as soon as I can." The nurses followed her orders and it took several minutes but once they got the lines started in his neck and the blood and fluids pouring in, his vitals began to even out, becoming more normal as the volume of blood and fluid in his system neared normal levels. She stopped the compressions as she heard the normal cadence of the machine monitoring his heart rhythm, letting her know it was ok to take him to the OR and fix his fracture. "Alright, let's get to the OR, Grace, call them and let them know we're coming. I want to roll right in, no waiting." Grace nodded and grabbed the phone, calling the OR and when she hung up, she said to Gaia, "The team is waiting. You can go in as soon as you get there."


	3. New Meetings

Many hours later, a bedraggled Gaia emerged from the Operating Room and headed to the doctor's locker room. She knew she most likely looked like hell and she had been told near the end of the procedure that her patients friend had arrived and that he was waiting for her in the waiting room, she knew that she needed to look halfway presentable and not scare them to death with how she looked coming right out of a surgery. Splashing water on her face and running her fingers through her hair, she stared in the mirror for a few seconds, yup, she looked utterly exhausted, like she had been run over by a MACK truck; which was normal she supposed for someone on their 18th our of a shift and had just spent 10 hours in the OR putting together a trauma victim. That was one of the things that Dirk had said made her unattractive, the fact that she didn't seem to put work into her appearance when she came home after a shift at the hospital. Not on to let a snarky comment slide, she had countered with, "I could barely stay awake to drive home and you want me to do a full makeover before I leave?" Well, that had earned her a slap across the face, usually splitting here lip or leaving her with a shiner that she HAD to use make up to cover, lest anyone at work start asking questions. She had become the master of making up excuses to explain why so had a shiner or bruise on her neck, arm or other part of her body. She shook her head and sighed, why was she letting that ass occupy space in her brain? It had been 6 months since she had thrown him out and she hadn't heard hide nor hair of him. It was obvious that he had moved on to someone new and she could only say good riddance to him and I'm sorry to whoever he had put under his spell, but she was glad it wasn't her. Shaking the memories of him out of her head, she splashed another few handfuls of water onto her face and took a deep breath in, letting it out slowly before she dried her face with rough, hospital issue paper towels and headed into the family waiting room. It wasn't a long walk to the Family Waiting Room from the doctor's lounge so she didn't have time to dwell over anything before she was pulling the door open and stepping into the waiting room, her eyes scanning the room for someone who looked like they belonged to the case she had just finished. She realized that was profiling, something she tried not to do, but she also knew that a lot of times she could just tell. She wasn't exactly sure why but she could tell who belonged with who. As it turned out, at this time of night there was only one person in the waiting room so the man sitting there had to be the one she was looking for. The television on the wall played some cheesy talk show but he wasn't paying any attention to it at all, in fact, he was looking down at his hands, absorbed in something he was doing. She shut the door softly behind her, straightened her posture so she looked like the trauma surgeon that she was, and went over to the man, she held out her hand and tried to offer a reassuring smile. "Hi, I'm Dr. Gaia McKenna., are you here waiting for Tom Gardner?" The man looked up at the sound of her voice, his deep green eyes flicking up to meet hers as the remnants of what had been a receipt or some other piece of paper fell into bits to the floor. Apparently he had been worrying it and tearing it up as he waiting for her to come out and let him know how his friend was doing. She could see the strain of waiting and the emotion around his eyes and mouth, clearly, he was expecting her to say something terrible and she could see why after how much work it had taken to put his friend back together after how badly he had been injured. As she had been trained in Medical School, her brain gave him a once over in the split second between her speaking to him and his response. He was tall, a few inches taller than her own 5'10'', had long, brown hair that was actually a mix of different shades of brown, tied in a neat, low ponytail at the base of his neck. He had deep green eyes and a beautifully carved face marred by only one scar that bisected his right eyebrow. Somehow, that made him even more attractive, instead of taking away from him, like he could wrap her in his arms and protect her from anything, keep her safe from all the evil in the world. What the hell was she thinking? She wondered with a start, this was her patients friend, not her significant other! She turned her mind back to her evaluation with an effort. His shoulders were wide and he wore a tight black t-shirt, vest and jeans with the same leather chaps that his friend had been wearing. His leather jacket and helmet were on the chair next to him. Finally, he wore black, square toe biker boots that looked well loved.Standing, he took her hand and shook it firmly but didn't let it go. Instead, he held it and stared at her with slightly red rimmed eyes. "Is Tom going to be ok?" He asked. "I'm sorry for being so direct but Tom is all the family I have, he's like my brother and I don't know what I would do if he was to not make it." He said in a soft voice, looking down to the ground for a moment. Gaia took the moment to give him the good news. "Tom is going to be ok Sir." She said, realizing she didn't know his name yet. "I just finished fixing the fracture of his lower right leg. It was pretty bad but I was able to put it back together with the help of metal rods and wires. Needlesstosay he will be here with us for awhile. He will have to go through PT and manage a flight of stairs before we can discharge him. He also had a collapsed lung that will be ok with the help of the chest tube that he has in him right now. We just have to wait for his lung to reinflate, and making sure it stays that way." She said. The man nodded as he followed what she was saying, letting go of her hand and clasping his hands behind his back. When she was finished he ran his hands over his hair and sighed. "I am his Power of Attorney and he is mine so please keep him safe and make sure you do everything you can to make him better." He said. "By the way, my name is Raiden....Raiden Hatterly. Now that we got all that out of the way,". His shoulders visibly relaxed as he kept speaking. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Dr. McKenna." He said and allowed a small smile to form in his lips. 


End file.
